Alhan Keser

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Kryptonite Locks: You need reputation management

June 18th, 2009 || 1 Comment »

Kryptonite, you had sold me already. The branding, the coolness of all the kids wearing your bike locks around their waists, and the practicality of your products had all convinced me that paying $100+ for a lock was so worth it. All of that came to a halt last weekend…

I am really into bikes. So when I go to pick out a lock, I am serious.  After pimping out my 1980’s Peugeot aluminum frame with new parts, I decided it was time for a new lock. My first thought was Kryptonite. Read the rest »

       

I love Threadless

May 22nd, 2009 || No Comments »

Alhan Keser

       

Spam on Vanderbilt.edu domain

April 14th, 2009 || No Comments »

I just noticed this piece of spam on the Vanderbilt subdomain, boinc.vanderbilt.edu. (Why am I surprised to find a Viagra ad on a domain name called “boinc”? Boinc btw is the name of an “open-source software for volunteer computing and grid computing.”)

The way I found this page was through a spammy comment on my company blog. What I also found out was that I could create my very own page on the Vanderbilt.edu domain. This appears to be common practice for viagra spammers. Below you can see both the spam page, and my very own page that I was easily able to create.

Spam page

Spam on Vanderbilt.edu subdomain

Spam on Vanderbilt.edu subdomain. Click image to see full size.

My own test page

The page that I created as a test on Vanderbilt.edu. Click the image to see full size.

The page that I created as a test on Vanderbilt.edu. Click the image to see full size.

       

Surprise Industries!

March 26th, 2009 || No Comments »

I attended the Media Networking Event at Columbia University last night on behalf of Blue Fountain Media and met Maya Gilbert from a very interesting start-up, called SurpriseIndustries. I promised I would blog about it because it is quite an interesting idea:

What is Surprise Industries?

They sell surprises.

What kind of surprises are we talking about?

The surprises can be anything from a ride on a ferris wheel, to an acrobatic yoga class, to a sessions of  hypnotherapy. The company does a good job of matching up surprise-seekers with the appropriate surprise.

How they can benefit you & your friends:

You tell them what time slots you are available for a surprise, and at any point you will be surprised with an interesting experience. You only pay for the cost of the activity. These surprises can also be gifted.

How they can benefit your business:

This is a great way to connect with potential clients. Come up with a good “surprise” that would interest someone: if you’re an SEO, that could be for example, creation of social media profiles and a blog. If you’re a web designer, why not create a mockup for a personal or family website? In the end, the point is that anyone who is surprised by your services will most likely talk about you to their friends as well. And we all know how effective word-of-mouth referrals are.

       

Avoid dupe content FAIL

March 10th, 2009 || 1 Comment »

Launch a redesigned website without destroying your SEO

Imagine you are doing a redesign on a gigantic website and you may or may not be doing some SEO for later down the road. As a responsible web developer you probably want to ensure that the client does not start to question why, all of a sudden, their search engine traffic dropped off the side of a cliff.

If you can preserve URLs as they are, then fine, there’s probably is not too much to worry about. But when you create a whole new URL structure and you’ve got a lot of pages, Here are a few basic steps to ensure that the website launch goes well. It is probably not the BEST way, but it is the SAFE way.

  1. Take a note of all indexed pages.

    To do so, simply check with Google, using the parameter, site:www.reallyridiculouslygoodlookingwebsite.com . Make sure to show all supplementary results as well so that you have a more complete list. If you are using the SEO plugin for Firefox (http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html) then you’ll be able to download this list as a .csv file. Nice.

    You can also go through the website’s html or xml sitemap for a list of its URLs. Have fun doing that. Read the rest »

           

    The lasting effects of SEO

    February 23rd, 2009 || No Comments »

    If there is still anyone out there who wonders why SEO is a good investment, here are two screenshots from R.A.G. New York’s analytics showing 1.) overall visitors and 2.) total conversions. Blue Fountain Media provided SEO services between April and September. Since then there has been no work done to promote the website.

    It is clearly visible that the fruits of our labor truly paid off after our work was done. R.A.G. was able to take full advantage of the holiday season search frenzy and many of those same visitors came back to the website early this year. Personalized search results had a big role to play here.

    The ROI of SEO: Line graph showing number of visitors to RagNewYork.com from April 2008 to February 21, 2009.

    The ROI of SEO: Line graph showing number of visitors to RagNewYork.com from April 2008 to February 21, 2009.

    Read the rest »

           

    I am member of the week

    February 10th, 2009 || No Comments »

    Thanks to my active and helpful participation on Entrepreneur Connect, I was chosen as member of the week.

    I will be featured on Entrepreneur Connect for one week.

    Alhan Keser featured on Entrepreneur Connect for one week.

           

    Did you see me at Comicon?

    February 9th, 2009 || No Comments »

    If you went to Comic Con New York 2009, you may have noticed an unfamiliar costume among the attendees. Referred to as “blue guy”, “blue man”, “blue friend”, and “blue dude”, this character was none other than Blastor from Biowars. And I was wearing the costume.

    Me dressed up in the custom-made Blastor costume, photo taken by Jurgen.

    Me dressed up in the custom-made Blastor costume, photo taken by Jurgen.

    Here is another photo taken of Blastor, alongside Halo.

           

    “Do not link to our website”

    February 6th, 2009 || No Comments »

    So I was sent a link to BuyBuy.com, a French website that features high-end fashion trends and articles and such. Now I lived in France for quite a few years and am familiar with the lack of understanding many folks have of the Internet and how it works and how it can be useful, but I figured that an online business would at least have some sense of what is beneficial for their business… links to their website. I guess not. I found this on their policy page:

    2.3 Hypertext links

    The creation of any hypertext links going to any one of the pages of this website is prohibited, unless authorized in writing by DREAMAG (name of company that owns BuyBuy.com), which can at any point in time be revoked.

    (Then it goes on to say something about the fact that BuyBuy.com is not responsible for the content on websites that do link to them.)

    Here a screenshot of the original, in French:

    From buybuy.com.

    From buybuy.com.

           

    8 Meaningless SEO pitches

    January 27th, 2009 || No Comments »

    As most SEO’s do, you probably stumble across a ton of website professing to do SEO with some interesting arguments to back up why they are the ones to go with. Some of what I find may sell well, but only to those client unfortunate enough to not consider some of what really goes into SEO. So, as my title promises, here are 8 really meaningless SEO pitches to watch out for:

    1. “We rank #1 on Google out of 92 million search results.”

    Who cares what you rank for, what do you clients rank for? And besides that, what difference does it make how many other results there are? Just because you have a lot of “competitors” for a keyword does not mean the keyword is highly competitive.  I am pretty sure that even if there were only eleven results that came up for the word ‘Google’ it would be just as hard to be on page 1 for it.

    2. “We are a Google AdWords Qualified Company.”

    PPC, SEO: not the same thing. There is little that one learns while preparing to become AdWords Qualified that has to do with SEO.

    3. “We submit your website to thousands of search engines.”

    That’s great, now thousands of search engines that no one uses know about you; it does not mean that they care about your website. Read the rest »